Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X Unveiled

Sapphire is working a new upcoming Radeon R9 290X in their Vapor-X series. What is interesting about this card is that Sapphire will be doubling the memory over AMD’s reference design, giving you a total of 8GB of VRAM! This will make the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X the first consumer-based graphics card with 8GB of VRAM.

This card will feature AMD’s Hawaii XT GPU so you will have 2816 stream processors, 176 TMUs and 64 ROPs. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory will run across a 512-bit interface. While the core and memory frequencies were not mentioned we can guess that this card will be overclocked from the R9 290X stock frequencies.

The card will feature a non-reference PCB with quality components. Cooling the card is a large triple-fan cooler and a heatsink with multiple heatpipes, much like we saw on the R9 280X Toxic. The color will be different though, it will be black with blue accents. The back of the card will have a massive backplate that not only will help with cooling, but stability of the card.

Display outputs include DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. No word yet on pricing or availability, but expect the card to be well above the $549 MSRP of the stock R9 290X.